


Terminating Process

by Stingalingaling



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-08-29
Packaged: 2019-07-04 03:01:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15832416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stingalingaling/pseuds/Stingalingaling
Summary: Having been picked up after 'Return 0', Harold's future looks a little bleak.





	Terminating Process

**Author's Note:**

> My first POI fic and unbeta'ed so I apologise in advance for any mistakes. I welcome corrections and feedback.

It was night when the dark, unmarked car entered the deserted construction site. Harold Finch sat uncomfortably in the backseat as they drove through the gateway, bumped up a ramp and round past the silent construction vehicles. He’d lost his watch at some point, but his glasses had managed to make every transfer with him and he stared vacantly through tinted windows at excavators, backhoe loaders and concrete mixing trucks. There were no cameras visible anywhere - not that there was anyone left to watch now – and he felt tired and truly alone.

The car headed away from the parking lot and towards more open ground and the prepared foundation excavations, its headlights picked out a gleam from a stack of steel rebar frames, before it came to a stop. The nameless driver and front seat passenger opened Harold’s door and pulled him out roughly by the shoulder of his issued blouson jacket and then by the handcuffs. In ten days, he’d gotten used to being passed about like a bag of groceries and of people asking him pointless questions. There had been a succession of smiling nurses, concerned doctors, inquisitive police officers, and scornful FBI agents but now he found himself in the custody of people who didn’t provide identification and who weren’t particularly interested in answers from him. Being picked up in the rubble of Midtown with an unexplained gunshot wound to the abdomen seemed the least of his worries now.

They guided him by the elbows to the edge of a large pit and Harold bit his lip. John and Root weren’t going to rescue him and with the Machine gone too, Miss Shaw could hardly be expected to locate and assist him. Assuming, he reflected gloomily, that she and the good detective had managed to survive their own battles with Samaritan agents.

His thoughts were interrupted by the approach of a second car, kicking up sand and dirt until it pulled up at right angles, killed its engine, but left its headlights on.  The two men at his elbows stiffened a little straighter as the driver’s door opened and a woman in black pant suit and leather gloves stepped out. Harold recognised her immediately and gasped.  It was unmistakably Control, even though her hair, while still severely pulled back from her forehead, was now pure white, and her face looked grey and haggard. Even the dark business suit she favoured was now a lot looser around her frame than when he had seen her last.

“What happened to you?” he blurted out.

She made no answer except to pull a gun from a pocket and point it at him. His escorts took that as a sign to remove his handcuffs, giving Harold the chance to pull down the black blouson that had ridden awkwardly up around his waist. Control smiled wryly at his fastidiousness and began to screw a silencer barrel onto her weapon. The two nameless men ghosted back to their own vehicle and Harold heard it start and drive away.

She took a step towards him and nudged open his jacket with the silencer, the barrel resting on the wound dressing under his tee-shirt.

“I heard you got shot,” she said. “How’s that healing up?”

“Does it matter?” he answered with more calmness than he thought he was capable of. If she wanted to play games, he wasn’t going to oblige her.

She shrugged and drifted back to lean casually against her car. 

“You asked me what happened. Well, Harold, I spent six months in a black site detention centre, thanks to you.”

“Me?”

There was an audible tut as she wagged her gun like a disapproving finger to a child.

“You were the person that got me digging into Samaritan.” Harold swallowed hard, but Control took a deep breath and continued. “But yes, I take your point, there’s more blame to go around than just you. There are other people I shall be having little chats with next. I’m authorised to handle the clean-up.” She flashed a dangerous grin. “I’ve finally made it to janitor. I thought you’d appreciate that.”

The gun in her hand relaxed a little and she continued, “Speaking of appreciation, I understand you killed Greer.”

“It wasn’t exactly like that…” But she cut short his protests with impatient amusement.

“You should really learn to take a compliment, Harold. You saved me a job.”

His eyes darted to the deep foundation pit at his side.

“Which brings us to now,” he reminded her sourly.

“That it does. Your little stunt with the ICE-9 virus caused a lot of damage globally. Banking systems, transport infrastructures, healthcare databases. Some countries will take years to rebuild. Officially we’re all blaming the Chinese but I’m afraid the Intelligence Committee doesn’t want you running around contradicting that.”

“I wasn’t really planning to,” he offered.

“Maybe not, but they don’t want to take any chances. And I’m afraid, speaking from first-hand experience, you won’t last five minutes in a black detention centre.”

“I take your point,” he conceded. He really didn’t want to imagine that.

“Do you want to know the worst part of those six months? Not knowing what was happening to my daughter. Not knowing if some _computer_ had deemed her irrelevant.” Her anger was palpable. “Nothing more than a loose end to be _dealt_ with.”

“I’m sorry.”

She nodded briefly at his sympathy then snapped back to business.

“My orders are to make you disappear,” she said bluntly, but then followed it with a disturbingly playful smile. “However, I've always enjoyed a certain latitude in how I choose to interpret _that_ word and I see no reason to change now. It’s a whole new world of irony here!”

Having practically winked, she moved abruptly to the back of her car and he lost sight of her as she popped the trunk.

“Do you want a gun?” she called out to him and Harold’s head started to spin. He looked up hopefully at the sky, but it was still only oppressively dark with neither moon nor stars and certainly no encouraging signs of dawn nor the comfort of bird flight.

“Harold? Snap to it. Do you need a gun?”

“Certainly not,” he muttered and limped cautiously round to the back of her vehicle.

The inside of her trunk looked like something John would have drooled over. A shotgun, a grenade launcher, boxes of ammunition, and various automatic weapons that Harold had never wanted to learn the names of.  But what interested Control was the retrieval of a black duffel bag that she now held out him.

“Clothes,” she explained. “And a new identity. But if you’re going to use the passport I should do it soon while the DSS system is still patchy.”

When he didn’t move to take it, she impatiently dropped it to the ground at his feet. Then, by way of an afterthought, she reached past a sniper rifle, produced her car’s first aid kit and tossed it towards his haul adding, “There should be enough sterile dressings in there for a few days.”

Harold was starting to question whether the woman had actually had some sort of breakdown during her captivity and stared at the bag in wide-eyed suspicion as if it were a mantrap.

Shaking her head in despair, Control reached once more back into the trunk and produced a flashlight.

“You’re clearly going to need this too.”

“I don’t understand,” he finally stuttered.

She flicked the light on and off for him and said, “There’s a little switch. You’ll figure it out.”

Recognising that she was now treating him like he needed help with his shoelaces, he bit back.

“No, I mean _all_ of this. Why are you doing this?”

The trunk slammed, and she was almost back to the driver’s seat when she turned to explain.

“Because ten days ago I learnt my daughter was actually safe and sound at a Swiss boarding school having been relocated on a full scholarship supplied by Thornhill Education Outreach.”

“Oh.”

“So I owe your machine for that, and frankly Harold…” She was grinning again, and it was still just as unsettling. “You caused such an _impressive_ amount of destruction to bring down Samaritan, that…” Her voice broke, betraying genuine emotion, “I don't think I've ever been prouder of another human being in my whole life.”

She gave a curt nod, sniffed, then drove away plunging Harold into darkness and leaving him to balance his gratitude at having his life spared with whether she was really the sort of person he wanted to have proud of him.

He stood still for two full minutes trying to adjust his eyes to the darkness. For the first time in his adult life he had no plan as to what to do next. He’d been so utterly sure that this was the end of his story, that for once, he had no contingency, hell, he didn’t even know what city he was in. Gracious, for that matter he couldn’t even see his way out of this construction site without twisting an ankle. After twenty seconds of unashamed panic, Harold Finch finally pulled himself together and remembered he had a flashlight.

 

 

_The end_

 


End file.
